June 05, 2008

More from Green Bag

Green Bag, self-described as "an entertaining journal of law," rarely disappoints. Also in the forthcoming issue, in addition to the judicial salary piece mentioned below, is an interesting article about the late Justice Thurgood Marshall's work in helping Kenya draft a bill of rights for its constitution in the early 1960s. Marshall often recalled it later in his life as an example of bringing American constitutionalism to the African nation. But University of Southern California professor Mary Dudziak reveals that in fact, the documentary evidence indicates that Marshall used other texts and not the U.S. Constitution.

The draft he offered to Kenya "had no American constitutional language in it," Dudziak report, but instead drew from the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the constitutions of Nigeria and other nations.

Also just published by the Green Bag is a book by the venerable Bennett Boskey entitled "Some Joys of Lawyering." The 91-year-old D.C. lawyer once clerked for judges Learned Hand, Stanley Reed, and Harlan Fiske Stone and became an expert on federal and Supreme Court rules. The book is a collection of Boskey's writings over the years. One is a recollection of Sunday tea in 1940 at the home of then-retired Justice Louis Brandeis, where another guest was an obscure senator named Harry S. Truman. In another essay, Boskey recalled the time when, as an editor at Harvard Law Review in 1938, he had to trim an 11,000-word book review authored by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover down to one-tenth the size.